This specification relates to generating search queries.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources, e.g., video and/or audio files, webpages for particular subjects, news articles, and so on. A search engine identifies resources of particular interest to a user in response to a user query. The user query includes one or more search terms, and the search engine uses these terms to identify documents that are responsive to the user query.
When performing a search, a user may not clearly express his or her need for information. For example, the user may provide a query that is very broad, is ambiguous, or is otherwise vague. Accordingly, the search engine may return results that are not of interest to the user, or do not fully satisfy the user's need for information. In contrast, a well-formulated query is a query that contains terms that result in the search engine identifying resources that address the user's intent, as measured by one or more performance metrics. For example, for both a vague query and a well-formulated query, the search engine may identify resources that satisfy the user's interest. However, for the vague query, search results that link to the resources that satisfy the user's need for information may not be highly ranked, and may not even be presented on a first page of search results. Conversely, for a well-formulated query, the search results that link to these resources are highly ranked.
Conventional technologies allow a search engine to identify well-performing queries from queries entered by users. The search engine recognizes well-performing queries. Well-performing queries can be, for instance, queries with results that many users have selected. These well-performing queries can then be suggested to users when the users provide queries to the search engine.
While the process of determining which queries provided by users are well-performing queries and using these queries and variations of these queries as query suggestions works well, the process only works on existing well-performing queries. As a result, the process may not identify other types of queries that may be well-performing queries if the other types of queries are not the underlying well-performing queries, or variations of those well-performing queries.